My first experience with what is called Living Scriptures is a book called “Prayer and Temperment.” This book examines prayer types based on the Meyer-Briggs temperment test: extroverts, introverts, the thinkers, the feeling types, etc, each having their own special prayer types. These prayer types may already be found in the Church’s great treasury of spirituality, and the authors categorize them as Benedictine, Augustininan, Carmelite, Franciscan, Dominican and so on.
That is where I learned that I needed to place myself within a Scripture passage. Like imagining I was a poor girl in Bethlehem, watching the Virgin and Joseph adore the Christ Child. And then imagining that the Virgin asked me if I’d like to hold Him. Or that I was one of the crowd about to stone the woman taken up in adultery. I’ve even seen someone take a rock and paint on it: The first stone. Like go ahead and throw a stone if you dare.
As I’ve learned to pray the Rosary, I’ve tried to imagine myself in the place of St. Peter or Pilate or Mary Magdalene or St. Elizabeth. The cast of characters is endless. And then there is imagining what it feels like to be Christ, and say, receive all of those lashes.
How about imagining you are administering the lashes? To Christ? To someone still walking this earth? Everytime I judge someone or keep using the whip on them in any way, I might as well pick up on of those nail tipped instruments of torture and lay into Our Lord.
Recently in prayer, as I was meditating on the Second Mystery of the Rosary, I heard, “Put down the whip.”
I am.